Benjamin Wachs: Private lives, public consequences and Anthony Weiner

America suffers from the peculiar delusion that certain kinds of people must be respectable even though they live in a culture without shame.

Benjamin Wachs

I write these columns almost a week before they appear, so I have no idea if anybody is still talking about Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-Easy Laugh.

But I suspect they are. Because his misdeeds symbolize the hypocrisy inherent in not only political discourse but much cultural discourse these days.

America suffers from the peculiar delusion that certain kinds of people must be respectable even though they live in a culture without shame. Teachers, librarians, day care workers — we expect the members of these professions to live lives of Victorian restraint while the rest of us glorify “Girls Gone Wild” and “Jersey Shore.”

Of course this can’t work. It’s not fair to hold a member of this century to the standards of the last, and when they inevitably slip up, we condemn them for violating rules we only pretend to care about. Usually, this is supposed to be in the service of children, as though a teacher with a healthy sex life is somehow more dangerous to kids than a teacher without. But most of the time I think this is hypocrisy for its own sake. The entire celebrity tabloid industry is based on the premise that we enjoy condemning people we don’t know for reasons we’re indifferent to.

If we actually cared about propriety, we would extol and praise people who live exemplary lives. But they don’t get book deals, TV specials or late-night talk show invitations. Pamela Anderson does.

Condemning vice without praising virtue is the hallmark of people who are just in it to kick someone when they’re down.

Nobody has it worse than politicians. Unlike teachers and librarians, who are mostly ignored by the public until they do something “wrong,” politicians are required to go before the voters every few years. They have to make promises of virtue that only the lobotomized could keep, and are bound to condemn anyone else who’s out of line (you can’t say “no comment” about Rep. Weiner’s shame if you don’t want to be called out by Fox News). It’s their job to have an opinion about public morality, and if they want to keep it they have to lie.

While they’re lying, they’re living in glass houses. They’re potentially “on camera” 24/7, and that means they can never blow off steam. They can never just relax. They can never indulge their weird-but-human impulses or be lazy or get too angry. If it’s not Twitter, it’s an aide angling for a book deal, or an ex-girlfriend hoping to get a reality show.

Pretending to be something you’re not builds pressure. When you have enough pressure, eventually there’s an explosion. If it seems impossible that so many smart politicians could lose so much by being so obviously stupid, well, this is what happens when you pretend to be someone you’re not for so long. Your coping mechanism gets self-destructive.

If we demand that our politicians lie to us to get elected, only liars will get elected. And when we discover they lied to us about who they are in their private lives — because they have what would be, for the rest of us, private lives — we’re all too happy to jump on the agonista bandwagon. Won’t someone whose primary job is a fundraiser set a good example?

No. No they won’t. They’ll live up or down to the standards the rest of us set. They follow the mob. Anthony Weiner may be a clown, but we’re the ones keeping this X-rated circus in business.

Benjamin Wachs writes for Messenger Post Media's print and online editions. Read his work at TheWachsGallery.com.